Professor Hansen, long famed as America's foremost exponent of the governmental policies derived from the "new economics" of Britain's John Maynard Keynes, still carries on his business at the same old stand. This time, however, he has presented his wares with both a new external decor and a significant number of changes in the internal mechanism. The key element in his program for preventing eatastrophic booms and busts remains the Federal government, but an inventory of its armory of weapons against depression and unemployment reveals a more diversified and better balanced set of techniques.

Some years ago, theorists of the Keynes-Hansen school were summarily tagged as "pump-primers." That emotionally charged label no longer does them justice. Professor Hansen argues tellingly for an integrated set of Federal policies which will diminish the roller-coaster swings of the economy from prosperity to ruin. The recommended measures include such familiar short-run ones as expanded public works in depression and cyclically adjusted tax burdens, together with attempts to get at the more fundamental factors through income redistribution, subsidized consumption, and active encouragement of private investment. The nation's best-known advocate of deliberate fiscal planning insists that reliance cannot be placed on any one policy alone, for a complex economic environment requires correspondingly complicated and flexible countermeasures.

That complexity comes close to defeating the purpose of such books as this. In his preface, the author states that his book is intended for "the more serious general reader," as well as the full-time student of economic problems. But the general reader, in order to understand what all the argument is about, must first be well acquainted with a forbidding amount of technical jargon. It is precisely the serious but uninitiated reader who will be most easily confused by a barrage of professional patois. After Ec A, Professor Hansen's latest book would be easy sailing. Unfortunately, most Congressmen have never undergone even that much introductory training.

Even a legislator, however, could understand the implications of Part Three of the volume, in which its author reviews succinctly the plans of Britain, Canada, Australia, and Sweden, contrasting with them the patchwork procedures so far evolved in the United States. The object-lesson is pellucidly set forth; in matters economic, this nation runs a poor fifth to its more enlightened and more alert neighbors. A solon utterly unable to follow the rigorous argument of the other parts of Professor Hansen's work would learn that the heresies of Lord Keynes are fast becoming the orthodoxies of chancellories from Stockholm to New South Wales.